Another Rate Jack Card Bites the Dust

As I posted yesterday, I’m in the process of paying off all my credit cards, especially the ones that Rate Jacked me for no reason at all. Gather Well Bank of America seems to have Rate Jacked over a million people with perfect payment histories for no reason at all. I’m proud to say that the balance is now zero and they are now forever sock drawered. I also have an emergency checking account that I keep with them that I will be closing thanks to their rate jacking decision.

In other news, I’m working on an article about not spending more than you can afford (duh, huh?) but trying not to make it cliche and giving some good example and alternatives. Look for it in the next couple days. I also removed the AdSense ads as they’re pointless right now and they take away credibility as to why I’m writing at the moment. (Not saying that ad money or referals are bad, you can shop via the Amazon link in the Blog Roll and earn me money to support the blog with your regular Amazon purchases, heh heh)

Update 03-01-08: I feel like a sell-out, but I wanted to keep the card open to decrease my total credit utilization. I called Customer Support today and asked for a rate reduction since they rate jacked me without any real reason, other than a high utilization, and that they were just trying to profit from customers who actually had good payment records. Last time I did this, when I had a balance, they just apologized and told me it was policy and they couldn’t lower my APR from what would soon be 27.99% (Millions of people got jacked to these sort of rates effective in May). This time however, explaining the situation and telling her that I wasn’t all too happy with BoA, and with a Zero balance on my card, the courteous Customer Service agent transfered me to Retention. So I got there, told them “I don’t authorize any hard pulls” (also note that my credit report does not reflect any of the zero balance paydowns yet, they still show the high utilization across the board for the most part), and explained the whole story and asked for a lower APR. He said “Let me see what I can offer you”, came back a couple minutes later, and told me that they could permanently decrease my APR to 12.99% ‘Fixed’ (which at least is an acceptable rate, but not one I would carry a balance on). I immediately asked that if I ran up 90% utilization on the card and held it at that for a year or two, providing I always made payments, even minimums (worst case situation), if it would stay at that 12.99%. He responded “Certainly”. I’m almost tempted to try it, just to see if they were lying, but I don’t want to spend the money on interest doing so.

So, the moral of the story is that if you got Rate Jacked by BoA, whether or not you can pay to Zero balance (tell them that they’ll lose you, and your ongoing profit if you can’t, or that you’ll balance transfer, or something else), ask to get sent to Retentions and ask for a lower APR. I’m guessing you might have a good chance at getting the Rate Jack that should have never happened reversed. If you’re in this situation and able to try this, please do so and post a comment here with your results, I’d be very interested to hear them.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 10:06 am and is filed under Credit / Debt, Money Matters, My Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.